Lauryn Hill Is Back Onstage With Her Magnetism Intact – The New York Times

It wasn’t just a club date and the start of a tour; it was also a video shoot. When Lauryn Hill performed at the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday night, the camera swiveling over the heads of the audience suggested that the show was something more than Ms. Hill’s re-emergence. It was gathering the kind of material performers use to promote new releases — which, in Ms. Hill’s case, would be more than welcome.

She has extraordinary gifts. Though her voice is lower and raspier than it was when she emerged in the 1990s, she is a supercharged soul singer who stokes her songs all the way through, and her rapping is breakneck, articulate and vehement. She’s also an improvisatory, drama-building bandleader. Throughout her two-hour set, her musicians were watching for her signals; to bear down on a vamp or silence it, to unveil pretty, elaborately planned vocal counterpoint from her three backup singers or to whip up a churchy fervor.